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US Patent Office Seeks Aid To Spot Bogus Patent Claims
First time accepted submitter startling writes "Members of the public are being asked by the US Patent Office to help weed out bogus patent applications. It wants the public to contribute to a website that will spot applications for patents on technologies that have already been invented. The website, called Ask Patents, will be run by US firm Stack Exchange that has a track record of operating Q&A websites."
Here's first such patent registered by Google: Patent #8,271,894
As noted on Slashdot, it's a patent for using anonymity online much like you can already. The problem here is that since Google has been awarded this patent, then other companies like Facebook or any other website CANNOT offer anonymity! This is a perfect example of a very dangerous patent and who else patented it than Google, the champion for losing anonymity on the internet.
Alert! Alert! Alert! Warning! Danger! Launch all lobbyists!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
...software or "computer program"
Software patents are a sign of government gone mad.
so that the USPO has to pay you to find bogus claims!
Please do our work for us.
Love,
The patent office.
"Come spend your time and money to help us now, or you may have to spend even more time and money later!"
The proper approach would be a system whereby the polluters (applicants of invalid patents) are required to compensate the people that find the prior art (and the broader the patent application, they more they have to pay). At least in that case the potential victims are compensated for their time, instead of doing the homework of the applicant and patent office for free.
(captcha: unevenly)
Rectangular with rounded corners is pretty bogus. How about all design patents and all software patents.
-- QED
Some patent troll claims to have invented a process to crowd source finding invalid patents. They want patent office to agree to license this technology from them for a hefty fee. Though prior art exists for using a large number of people searching documents to find examples of prior art and invalid claims, the troll claims innovative new original work in using the "internet" to do the search. As everyone knows, even if people have been doing something for ages, if you stick in the phrase, "using internet" it suddenly becomes new, original and innovative.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Palm trees and 8
Invalidate all existing patents and start over. This is just getting ridiculous.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
MPEG LA claims to manage 346 patents (in the USA alone) which are necessary for anyone who wants to write a video player that can play this very widely used format.
Eliminating 5%, or even 95% of these patents will change nothing. Software developers will still have to ask MPEG LA for permission, and MPEG LA will continue to prohibit free software implementations.
Why bother with these complicated, time-consuming ideas? The way to fix the problem (and unblock the patent office), is to make software simply non-eligible.
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Raising_examination_standards_wouldn't_fix_much
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Do you mean, like, READING them? You know, BEFORE they break out that rubber stamp?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Representation of elliptic curves seem pretty bogus to me. How about all software and design patents?
Happy now?
Palm trees and 8
Not a bad idea, but the horses are already out of the barn. Trying to close the doors now will just make things worse, without a major reversal of not just bogus patents, but patentable items (like software and business processes).
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I found a virus on my computer which was taking random terms and filing USPTO claims, debiting $ filing fees from my bank account. Oddly, USPTO granted more patent claims than people clicked on the links selling viagra ten years ago.
Gently reply
Wouldn't it be easier to simply grant anybody any patent they want, and then revoke it if another party produces evidence of obviousness or prior art?
We already have its worst-case scenario - ridiculous patents, virtually the same one granted to several different parties, and the parties suing each other over their "portfolios".
Might as well skip the years of up-front research that do nobody any good, and cut straight to the lawsuits.
Software is not of patent-able subject matter.
Of the things that universally agreed cannot be patented:
Abstract ideas,
Physical Phenomenon.
Natural Law.
Because they cannot be enforced
and out of these comes mathematical algorithms as a forth.
All these together describe software and there is more
see http://abstractionphysics.net/
Corporations start flooding this thing to try and manipulate it to their interests?
Dear United States Patents and Trademarks Office,
It has come to my attention that your organisation has resorted to begging for free work from the Public in finding and reporting on prior art to already-issued patents. I have an issue with this action, since as an inventor myself I have invested thousands of Dollars in patenting actual technology that has no discovered prior art and in fact has potential to change the lives of everyone who uses it. The issue boils down to the amount of money I have paid to your organisation in fees with my patent applications, on the understanding that you yourselves employ staff to perform patent searches and research into prior art on patent applications; indeed, a small proportion of my applications have been rejected due to prior art that I either did not consider relevant or I missed and you informed me that it did in fact exist. That is a system which works.
And now you're asking the public to carry out this work for nothing? Is this overflow for the sheer number of patents that are disputed in courts up and down the country? Or are you laying off staff and diverting that workload that you should be paying staff to do in order for your executive board to pocket the fees in massive bonuses and now granting every application that hits your inbox? Frankly I think you should be watching patent cases and automatically invalidating those which are found to be without merit in such disputes.
Sincerely,
Disgruntled inventors everywhere.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If it contains the words, "using a computer," or some such derivative, it is almost certainly a bogus patent application.
Patents should be for actual physical devices. Not concepts, procedures (software), words, ideas, or geometric shapes. Trademarks and copyrights will still be available for abuse on those but lets take patents back to what they were originally intended for. Oh, and automatically invalidating patents held by non-practicing entities would also be another good idea (pipe dream I know, patent trolls are usually run by lawyers and they won't allow their gravy-train to end and have plenty of ill gotten gains for lobbyists).
Capcha = quagmire
a) any patent extending or similar to existing patents, application price is x2 for research .....
b) any patent where similar work is easily found by the patent office but was not referred, costs x5 to continue application once the similar work is found
c) any patent where terms are obfuscated by not using the most common industry standard terminology and reference terms x2 for research
d) any patent where once obfuscated terms are cleared up similar work is easily found, costs x10 to continue application
e) idea registery separate from patent. not subject to exploding fees as above. the idea is open and can be used by anyone. Is a sort of defensive patent. Means anyone can use the idea and it cannot be patented and held proprietary by anyone.
f) different costs for patents in different areas due to research needed
lots of ways to provide support
USPTO is paid to do a job, if it's incapable or unwilling to do that job, then it should be opened up to other companies.
Here's a very simple proposal:
* Anyone can create a patent office,
* it is like insurance, you take it out to protect your invention,
* it costs proper money, you don't pay, you don't have cover
* insurance company needs to have financial coverage to cover the insurance it issues.
* if the invention is invalid due to prior art or lack of eligibility, The troll compensates for the damage it did.
* The troll company can reclaim the damages from the insurance company it got the patent from
* If the troll company goes out of business, the insurance company is fully liable
* If the insurance company goes out of business, tough luck. They didn't do their patent checking well enough.
Over time bad patent issuer will price themselves out of the market, with too many bad choices, and disappear.
Good patent issuers will survive, the ones that focus on true inventions.
At the moment we have the USPTO which had management that decided it would interpret it's mandate to rubber stamp patents, even today it still only pays lip-service to prior art, and pushed for the date of filing to be the date of invention, even when the inventor doesn't have a working invention, only a speculative document.
Let the market decide.
"Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software," said Stack Exchange boss Joel Spolsky in a blogpost about the site ... Mr Spolsky said that although US patent clerks worked hard they typically had less than 22.5 hours so spend on each application.
I can understand the USPTO having difficulty finding all prior art with limited resources, but why do they need help determining that something is obvious? It seems they could save a lot of time hunting for prior art if they just took the "non-obvious" part of the patent requirement seriously and dismissed all of the "do X obvious thing with a computer" patents right off the bat.
The problem here is that since Google has been awarded this patent, then other companies like Facebook or any other website CANNOT offer anonymity!
That's absolutely false. One of the primary purposes of the patent systems is to identify areas of "innovation" very precisely so that people can license these ideas. There is the 'carrot' way of doing this whereby you would approach Google and ask them how much they want for you to license a patent and, since there's nothing forcing Google to license those ideas, the alternative is "stick licensing." So if Facebook wanted to use anonymity in this specific way, the courts would need to determine how much damage this did to Google. I really can't see anyone in their right mind claiming much in damages in that situation. At that point both companies should agree on some form of licensing based on what damages the court found.
... however I also don't like what software patents are doing today and I feel like we need to find a better approach to this complicated problem.
Anonymity itself cannot be patented since the concept is very very old. So Facebook would be free to invent an alternative way to offer its users anonymity than the very specific way presented by Google. Your jump from Google's patent to generic anonymity shows that you do not understand then intense and rigorous legalese that patents must follow. That demonstration is another issue entirely (and the biggest blocker to Stack Exchange's proposal).
If you read the above as a defense of patents, you're wrong. I'm trying to help you understand that patents are bad but hyperbole doesn't help anyone when they're trying to make the system better. I don't want a world where we have no intellectual property laws and ideas are stolen wholesale
My work here is dung.
What could possibly go wrong? It's not like anyone would astroturf their patents. Right?
The committee members are for the most part the companies holding all the patents in the area. They work hard to incorporate their own patented technologies in the standard and when a new idea gets discussed in a meeting they call their patent attorneys to patent it. MPEG-LA patents are often on using a particular constant for some age old algorithm. Such patents are very defensible in court because there is no real reason a person skilled in the arts would pick that particular constant if working in a vacuum. In order to defend against such a patent you would for example need to prove not only that someone ran quicksort with 20 items in the list before the patent was issued, but that this was also published that in a form acceptable to every patent office in the world (note posting it on a mailing list or on your blog doesn't count in most places.)
If you want patent free standards then you need to get governments involved; they need to invalidate all patent claims against those implementing the standard and they need to compensate the patent holders. There would still be incentive to stuff the standard with as many of your patented technologies as possible which is a real problem. Standards tend to contain a lot of unused and unusable cruft in addition to any good stuff they contain.
Sounds too good to be true.
Why not hire some folks to do such a thing? i would love to apply for this job. The requirements are that these people be Reasonable, and Prudnet.
Maybe it's time to restrict patents to fields that need real innovation. In many fields, patents have simply added unnecessary overhead to the cost of production. Patents for a fusion reactor or a better rocket engine might be necessary to protect the huge investments necessary to engineer and build prototypes. But are patents necessary for product design elements that anyone with a little knowhow can produce with off-the-shell CAD software?
1. If it was good enough for Einstein, it's good enough for you. Spend a little time reading patents. Maybe you'll change the world
2. Congratulations to Spolsky and Atwood, because damn
Because patent maximalists made the patent GRANTED by default, not the patent REFUSED by default.
So they put the patent examiner in the position of proving why the patent SHOULDN'T be granted, with limited access to the inventions, the best ones of which are trade secrets, or exist in some lab somewhere waiting to be turned in commercial products.
The "with a computer" is an example of this, the interpretation of the patent office is that "on a phone" makes it a new invention. Yet for some patents Apple is claiming the iPhone is covered by a patent that says "on a computer". If an iPhone is a computer for one patent claim, why is it something unique and special for another??? It makes no sense, yet that's the way it is.
grep "plurality" *
Or better still, grant no patents, let the market sort it out.
Competition is good, if you have an invention, keep it secret till your ready to go to market, sell as many as you can while you have the exclusive. Quit whining about others making 'your' invention and come up with something new.
If they're causing so much damage, then the best solution is removing patents altogether,
The patent office can just click the little "invalidate" button on that patent......problem solved and the patent troll has one less bullet in its gun.
From this:
"...the opinion of many scientists was that some 90% of the three billion DNA letters in our cells has no function at all--calling it “junk DNA.” Now, a ten year follow-on research project is beginning to publish discoveries centered within this so called junk DNA code. Like the complex rule base of an expert system on a computer, it is now estimated that 80% of our DNA contains a “complex network of regulatory switches that control how cells interpret the genetic instructions contained in DNA.”"
-and-
US Patent #4,318,184:
1982 patent that relates to generative process planning derived from design and material specifications.
"This interlocking network of regulatory switches that control gene activity certainly seems to me to be similar to an expert system. An expert system is carefully designed, with complex interactions between the rules of the system, often based on man-centuries of research and experience. As a programmer, it would be ludicrous to think that complicated programming logic similar to the production expert systems we worked on in industry could “write itself,” without intelligence or design."
Yet, that's exactly what's happened with DNA, over millions of years, from a pool of primordial sludge of amino acids and RNA to where we are now, a veritable feast of complex organisms. As a technological culture we're about to the point where growing earlobes on the backs of laboratory mice is done for giggles these days. All we're doing is rewriting some code, albeit using a soup of chemicals and an electric charge in lieu of a keyboard. And by applying the language of the engineer to the biological process, chemical engineers are able to con us all by demanding royalty with menaces on the use of something we were all born with.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I suggest the USPTO reviews the following patents:
Patent #1 to Patent #..(whatever number it is at)
A baby step in the right direction is still better than what we have now. It opens up the possibility of further positive changes in the future. I just wonder how serious they will take this.
Does this help fight patents that are obvious? Does this help fight patents where prior art exists? Does this help fight things that are unable to be patented because they are to general? Can I at least through out the dozen or so trolls that are looking to patent the word "patent".
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
Or, to lessen the work load, how about we just try to pick out the legit ones. Shouldn't be near as many.
US Patent Office Seeks Aid To Spot Bogus Patent Claims
How about patrolling East Texas court rooms, for starters.
They should make sure prior art can be applied as well and make sure "first to file" doesn't come to pass.
I have an IDEA for them right here: shut down.
Shut down and stop distorting the market. Those who have legitimate good ideas should use contracts, non-disclosure agreements and trade secrets instead of patent trolling. That's it, problem solved.
No no, what am I talking about, I am actually looking at the root cause of the real problem, they are not interested in that, they want to keep their jobs.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
See all those Software and Business 'Process' patents? Throw them all in the trash. All of them.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
http://www.google.com/patents/US7760357
Just look for the words "on a computer."
Yes. This is a welcome development by the USPTO.
'Fires are lighted on the piers of the mountain peaks.'
'A Call to All goes out.'
'And it WILL be answered ... even though the enemy received the call as well ... '"they can't read it! ... AHHA! ... beautiful"'.
This is so easy...
function patent_validator(patent) {
if(patent->application->status == 'new') then
if(patent->type == 'software') then
patent->reject();
else
patent->length = 10 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60;
fi
else
patent->length = 1 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60;
fi
return patent;
}
The USPTO is following the whims of the world or should I say corporations.
Patent trolls enjoy!
I convey that sentiment. First to File vs. First to Conceive (invent). Don Costar, the US god-father of invention might say a few words.
Ps. www.doncostar.com